apartment house’s yard. As he landed and rolled, he glanced back at the lower floors. Lights were on inside the apartments, but all the drapes were closed, and there were no silhouettes.
Ignoring that incongruity, Harry pushed himself to his feet, and vaulted over the nine-foot-high wrought-iron fence which encircled the yard. He landed on the sidewalk and ran into the nearly deserted street. Empty, save for parked cars and Patterson’s crippled Continental.
The Inspector raced down the street, to see the woman turn to the right on Kirkham Street. He made it to the corner in record time, only to glimpse her getting on a bus halfway down the block. There was no way he could reach the bus in time, and, with all the other traffic, he didn’t dare try to blow out its tires.
But Harry Callahan refused to give up. As he prayed for a little luck, he saw the bus pull out into late traffic, but get stopped a few hundred feet beyond by a stoplight. Harry silently thanked the powers that be for that extra one minute edge, and ran through the traffic with abandon.
He kept twisting and dodging between autos, then leaped on the back of the next car in front of him and started running across the tops of the parked cars.
He jumped from roof to roof until he was in the line behind the bus, and then he leaped from hood to trunk, suffering the curses of outrage from the surprised drivers.
But luck wasn’t with him the entire trip. Just as he got within fifty yards of the bus, the light changed. Oblivious to the chase, the transport took off, leaving Harry behind in a cloud of noxious fumes.
Without pausing, he dropped to the street next to the driver’s window of the last car he had landed upon. Brandishing his badge and his gun, he all but wrested the man from behind the wheel of his Toyota.
“Police business,” he assured him through clenched teeth.
“But, my car” the bearded, bespectacled man complained. “How am I going to get home?”
“Go to the nearest police station,” Harry told him quickly, getting behind the wheel and closing the door on the driver. “Tell them Inspector 71 took your car.” Keeping a thumb on the horn, he awkwardly shifted into second when it sounded as if the engine would rip itself apart, causing the auto to jerk its way across the nearly empty sidewalk.
It was slow going, since he had to stop for everyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough, but he was still covering more ground than those drivers on the congested streets. He stayed on the sidewalk until he reached the corner, and then, horn still blaring, he tore out into the four-way intersection. He managed to slip in between two lanes of traffic, but an oblivious driver, taking a right turn, clipped the Toyota across the back, pushing the Japanese car into the parked vehicles at the side of the street.
Callahan was thrown to the passenger seat by the small crash, but he pulled himself upright immediately. The engine had died when the car had slowed while in third gear, so Harry slammed down the clutch and twisted the key viciously to get the thing going again.
The car was instantly revived and lurched forward, the back of the bus looming in the windshield. But, once he reached the bus’s rear, he was stuck there. The right lane was completely jammed, and two lanes of cars were streaking by in the opposite direction on his left.
The thought of all those dead men in Patterson’s apartment inspired him to even greater heights of reckless, furious courage. Harry pulled the car to the left, trying to find a hole in the oncoming traffic big enough for him to swerve ahead of the bus.
He tried once, nearly getting into a head-on collision with a Mustang. He weaved again, but the Toyota’s pickup wasn’t fast enough. He had to brake and slip back behind the bus before a Ford station wagon plowed into him.
The one good thing about his crazy driving, however, was that everyone around him gave him plenty of room. No other driver
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